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      Biden, Congress and the Eroding Separation of Powers

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      A curious constitutional drama unfolded in the nation’s capital last week. Having failed to pass a moratorium on evictions, members of Congress took to the steps of the U.S. Capitol to demand that President Biden impose one.For his part, Mr. Biden strode into the White House briefing room and suggested that the prerogative to make policy on the issue lay with Congress.Soon enough, though, Mr. Biden relented, and Democrats celebrated. As policy, it was a progressive victory. Constitutionally, it was both troubling and bizarre.The issue was not simply whether the moratorium was constitutional, though the federal courts have questioned the statutory authority the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claimed. The underlying constitutional derangement pertained to the way members of Congress and the president were eager to endorse each other’s authority without exercising their own.Democrats might protest that they had no choice but to turn to the White House because Republicans would not support a legislative moratorium. That may be, but the framers would have expected the defense of legislative power to take precedence over a policy dispute.The framers assumed that each branch of government would maintain the separation of powers by jealously guarding its authority from encroachments by the others. The evictions episode was less tug of war than hot potato: Congress wanted the president to use executive authority, and the president wanted the legislature to legislate.Democrats are not the only ones refusing to defend legislative authority. Republicans denigrating the House investigation into the insurrection of Jan. 6 — a physical assault on one branch of government incited by another — are unwilling even to defend the institution bodily.The acid test of separation of powers is whether members of Congress are willing to assert their authority against a president of their own party. Democrats failed that on evictions, just as Republicans did by handing off authority to Donald Trump. Given this bipartisan consensus for presidential authority, it may be time to acknowledge reality: The concept of the separation of powers — which depends on members of Congress unifying to protect legislative power — has collapsed in the United States. We have become a de facto parliamentary system in which competing parties battle for executive power. The problem is that we have acquired all the vices of such a system but none of its virtues.A parliamentary system typically has the effects of discouraging demagogues and ensuring competence, by seasoning leaders on the journey from the backbenches to the ones at the front. By contrast, three presidents who served before Joe Biden — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Mr. Trump — arrived in the White House as either newcomers or latecomers to national office. Parliamentary systems also feature vigorous debates with real consequences. Governments rise and fall on the basis of their legislative agendas. Debates in Congress are largely stagecraft, with actual governing being relegated to a vast executive branch empowered to turn vague laws into detailed policy.The primary vice of parliamentary systems is their incompatibility with the separation of powers. James Madison felt this separation was so important that the lack of it was “the very definition of tyranny,” even if concentrated powers were exercised benignly. Montesquieu warned that when executive and legislative power are mixed, “there is no liberty, because one can fear that the same monarch or senate that makes tyrannical laws will execute them tyrannically.”The separation of powers should not be romanticized. The only president to rise fully above party was the first one, and George Washington took office before parties solidified. But even after that, the fact that presidents and members of Congress were elected by different means, with different institutional loyalties, still enabled them to curb each other’s abuses.There are almost no curbs now. One might say elections control presidents, but Mr. Trump’s efforts to undo the 2020 presidential contest, which culminated in Jan. 6, showed that check is fragile. In addition, a single official who can marshal the direct power of his or supporters may be particularly dangerous, as Mr. Trump’s incitement leading up to and on Jan. 6 also demonstrated.These are palpable risks today. Between elections, presidents essentially run American government. Republicans and Democrats in Congress play the auxiliary part of either supporting or opposing whoever occupies the White House. Congress generally cedes the initiative on legislation to the executive branch, reserving for itself the role of merely reacting to the president.This obsession with the presidency also crowds out other advantages the separation of powers should provide. Legislators are chosen geographically in the United States, which ought to mean they reflect not only local interests but also the nuances of diverse views about national politics. Instead, many elections at all levels are proxies for national issues that are increasingly seen as civilizational battles. When Americans vote for members of Congress today, they are largely voting for parties that increasingly operate in lock step. In 2020, 16 out of 435 congressional districts voted for different parties for the White House and House of Representatives. That is less than 4 percent of congressional districts, down from as much as 40 percent in the 1970s and 1980s.Also lost in the collapse of geographic representation is Madison’s definition of the representative’s role: to “refine and enlarge the public views.” That presumes both acquaintance with those views and the judgment required to align them with the public’s true interest.Legislative debates now rotate around the president, often because the presidency is seen as an instrument for defending or capturing a legislative majority. That is characteristic of a parliamentary system. But because one is either for or against the president, a system that orbits the White House strips legislators of their ability to exercise independent judgment from issue to issue.If legislative issues are simply symbols of presidential fortunes, we should expect partisan gridlock: Alliances will solidify around the presidency or the majority rather than shifting from issue to issue. Democrats and Republicans may be able to push a president slightly in one direction or another, or block him or her altogether, but the presidency remains the center of attention. The bipartisan infrastructure deal, for example, originated in negotiations not between members of Congress but between them and the White House.Finally, by empowering all three branches of government to check one another, the separation of powers forces the nation to look at issues from different angles: the immediate and parochial perspectives of representatives, the national view of presidents and the constitutional outlook of the courts.The problems with abandoning the separation of powers may be difficult to see if one supports the current president, but it should not take much imagination to contemplate why you wouldn’t like having the bulk of national powers being exercised by a president with whom you disagree. Presidents now sit atop vast administrative apparatuses. They could easily abuse this power, such as by rewarding friends and punishing adversaries. The point for Montesquieu and Madison was not whether they actually did, but whether they could. And the ability to abuse power often leads to the abuse itself.The deliberate adoption of a parliamentary system would still entail these risks. But it might at least have conferred some of that system’s benefits. As it stands — with Congress unwilling to unite against even a physical assault incited by the president — we have maintained the empty shell of the separation of powers around the core of a partisan system. The result is a system capable of abusing citizens but not governing them. It would be difficult to conjure a worse combination.Greg Weiner (@GregWeiner1) is a political scientist at Assumption University, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “The Political Constitution: The Case Against Judicial Supremacy.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Don’t Be Fooled By Mitch McConnell’s Sudden Bout of Bipartisanship

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      Are we entering a new era of bipartisanship? On the surface, the news from Washington seems remarkably encouraging. The Senate is close to passing a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, with $550 billion in new spending on everything from transit to highways to broadband to climate change mitigation. Political insiders are hailing the bill as a breakthrough, with the Senate poised, at last, to overcome the partisan gridlock that has ground its legislative machinery to a halt. Many thought that President Biden’s belief that he could get Republican votes was naïve, but he delivered. In a surprise, even the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, voted to move the compromise to a vote.Of course, this is the same Mitch McConnell who said of Mr. Biden, “100 percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration.” The same Mr. McConnell who made sure Donald Trump’s impeachment did not result in conviction, who filibustered the bipartisan plan for a commission to investigate the Jan. 6 violent insurrection until it died, who kept all of his Republican senators in line against the American Rescue Plan early in the Biden presidency. And the same Mr. McConnell who said that he would not confirm a Biden nominee to the Supreme Court if Republicans recaptured the Senate in 2022.So why the reversal on infrastructure? Why dare the brickbats of Donald Trump after the former president bashed the effort and tried to kill it? Mr. McConnell has one overriding goal: regaining a majority in the Senate in 2022. Republicans must defend 20 of the 34 Senate seats up for grabs next year; there are open seats in Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina; and Senator Ron Johnson, if he runs again, could easily lose his seat in Wisconsin. Attempting to block a popular infrastructure bill that later gets enacted by Democrats alone would give them all the credit. Republicans would be left with the lame defense of crowing about projects they had voted against and tried to block, something that did not work at all with the popular American Rescue Plan.You don’t have to be a Machiavellian to understand another reason Mr. McConnell was willing to hand Mr. Biden a victory on infrastructure: By looking reasonable on this popular plan, claiming a mantle of the kind of bipartisanship that pleases Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and that mollifies suburban moderate Republicans in key states, Mr. McConnell can more easily rally his troops behind their goal of obstruction and delay for every other important Democratic priority, including the blockbuster reconciliation bill, as well as voting rights and election reform.For Mr. Biden, this bill is a political victory; the fact that he worked across party lines distinguishes him from his Republican predecessor, which should give the president a powerful appeal among independents and moderate Republicans. But for congressional Democrats, despite the true achievement of persuading 10 Republicans to sign on to an ambitious infrastructure plan, the road ahead is bumpy, winding and complicated.If this bill is signed into law, the Democrats will still need to face hard reality: This will be their last major bipartisan piece of legislation.Of course, there may be other issues below the partisan radar, like criminal justice reform and mental health reform, that can secure significant Republican support. But thanks to Mr. McConnell, everything else will face a wall of obstruction. Since the midterms will take all the focus off policymaking in Congress, the Democrats need to achieve democracy reforms and move on with the rest of their agenda using reconciliation. (The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, will also be navigating another confrontation over the debt ceiling, but he might be able to include eliminating the ceiling within reconciliation, taking it off the table as a hostage once and for all.)The two key words are discipline and filibuster. Overcoming Mr. McConnell’s obstruction will require all 50 Senate Democrats to stick together, to swallow hard with necessary compromises — and of course, the same is true for House Democrats, who cannot afford to lose the votes of even four of their members. To achieve anything else will require a change in the Senate rules. It does not have to be elimination of the filibuster, or what Senator Manchin would define as a “weakening” of the rule. It will require a way to put the burden on Mr. McConnell and the minority instead of where it is now, entirely on Mr. Schumer and the majority.Norman J. Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) is an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His latest book, which he wrote with E.J. Dionne and Thomas E. Mann, is “One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate and the Not-Yet Deported.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Senate Democrats Hold Hearing on Voting in Georgia

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      ATLANTA — Senate Democrats took their campaign for far-reaching federal voting rights legislation on the road to Georgia on Monday, convening a rare hearing in a state at the center of a national fight over elections.At a field hearing in Atlanta, lawmakers and voters decried the restrictive new voting law signed this spring by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, as an attempt to disenfranchise Black and young voters and consolidate Republicans tenuous grip on power.“There is much talk about not being able to give food and water to voters on line, but the actual law is much more abhorrent than that,” said Representative Billy Mitchell, the chairman of the Georgia House Democratic caucus. “What I am most concerned about — and hope you come up with a solution for — is cheating umpires that these laws are creating.”But the hearing’s real aim is to sway a debate more than 500 miles away in Washington, where Democrats are trying to revive a stalled elections overhaul in the Senate to make it easier to vote and offset many of the changes Republicans have pushed through in states like Georgia.“If you just stay in Washington and get doused down and gridlocked out by our archaic procedures in the Senate, you lose sight of what you are fighting for,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota and the chairwoman of the Rules Committee, which is convening the session, said in an interview.An initial attempt by Democrats to debate their overhaul, the For the People Act, failed in the Senate last month in the face of unified Republican opposition. Now, Democrats are trying to retool, but it is unclear if their chances of success will improve as long as key moderate senators refuse to alter the Senate’s filibuster rule, which in effect gives Republicans veto power over their agenda.Party leaders are working with Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, the most outspoken Democratic opponent of the measure, to draft a narrower compromise bill, which could come up for another vote in August or the fall. They are also readying additional legislation, named after the late civil rights icon John Lewis of Georgia, to strengthen the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That, too, could come to a vote in the fall.Given the likelihood that both those efforts would fall amid Republican opposition, Democrats have begun work to try to include more modest voting rights measures in the party’s $3.5 trillion budget blueprint, which they are working to muscle through the Senate on a simple majority vote.The hearing at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights here is the first time in two decades the Rules Committee has convened outside the Capitol. Ms. Klobuchar has said additional field hearings will follow.Among the witnesses are Sally Harrell, a Democratic state senator from suburban Atlanta; Helen Butler, the executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the Peoples’ Agenda; and José Segarra, a voter from south-central Georgia. Senator Raphael Warnock, whose improbable victory in a runoff election here in January delivered control of the Senate to Democrats, also addressed the panel.Republicans on the Rules Committee, who have fought to stymie Democrats’ election overhaul in the Senate, did not attend the hearing.“This silly stunt is based on the same lie as all the Democrats’ phony hysteria from Georgia to Texas to Washington, D.C., and beyond — their efforts to pretend that moderate, mainstream state voting laws with more generous early voting provisions than blue states like New York are some kind of evil assault on our democracy,” Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, said in a statement. More

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      Biden Speaks on Voting Rights in Philadelphia

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      WASHINGTON — President Biden said on Tuesday that the fight against restrictive voting laws was the “most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War” and called Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election “a big lie.”In an impassioned speech in Philadelphia, Mr. Biden tried to reinvigorate the stalled Democratic effort to pass federal voting rights legislation and called on Republicans “in Congress and states and cities and counties to stand up, for God’s sake.”“Help prevent this concerted effort to undermine our election and the sacred right to vote,” the president said in remarks at the National Constitution Center. “Have you no shame?”But his words collided with reality: Even as Republican-led bills meant to restrict voting access make their way through statehouses across the country, two bills aiming to expand voting rights nationwide are languishing in Congress. And Mr. Biden has bucked increasing pressure from Democrats to support pushing the legislation through the Senate by eliminating the filibuster, no matter the political cost.In fact, the president seemed to acknowledge that the legislation had little hope of passing as he shifted his focus to the midterm elections.“We’re going to face another test in 2022,” Mr. Biden said. “A new wave of unprecedented voter suppression, and raw and sustained election subversion. We have to prepare now.”He said he would start an effort “to educate voters about the changing laws, register them to vote and then get the vote out.”The partisan fight over voting rights was playing out even as the president spoke, with a group of Texas Democrats fleeing their state to deny Republicans the quorum they need to pass new voting restrictions there.In his speech, Mr. Biden characterized the conspiracy theories about the 2020 election — hatched and spread by his predecessor, Mr. Trump — as a “darker and more sinister” underbelly of American politics. He did not mention Mr. Trump by name but warned that “bullies and merchants of fear” had posed an existential threat to democracy.“No other election has ever been held under such scrutiny, such high standards,” Mr. Biden said. “The big lie is just that: a big lie.”About a dozen Republican-controlled states passed laws this spring to restrict voting or significantly change election rules, in part because of Mr. Trump’s efforts to sow doubt about the 2020 results.Republicans, who have called Democrats’ warnings about democracy hyperbolic, argue that laws are needed to tamp down on voter fraud, despite evidence that it is not a widespread problem. They have mounted an aggressive campaign to portray Mr. Biden’s voting-rights efforts as self-serving federalization of elections to benefit Democrats.The president’s speech, delivered against the backdrop of the birthplace of American democracy, was intended to present the right to vote as a shared ideal, despite the realities of a deeply fractured political landscape.Democratic efforts to pass voting rights legislation in Washington have stalled in the evenly divided Senate. Last month, Republicans filibustered the broad elections overhaul known as the For the People Act, and they are expected to do the same if Democrats try to bring up the other measure — the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, named for a former Georgia congressman and civil rights icon — which would restore parts of the Voting Rights Act struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013.In a statement, Danielle Álvarez, the communications director for the Republican National Committee, said that Mr. Biden’s speech amounted to “lies and theatrics.” Republicans had unanimously rejected the For the People Act as a Democratic attempt to “pass their federal takeover of our elections,” she said.There were also concerns among more moderate members of Mr. Biden’s party that the legislation was too partisan. Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have publicly said they would not support rolling back the filibuster to enact it.But other Democrats see a worrying increase in efforts by Republican-led state legislatures to restrict voting, along with court rulings that would make it harder to fight encroachments on voting rights.A Supreme Court ruling this month weakened the one enforcement clause of the Voting Rights Act that remained after the court invalidated its major provision in 2013. Mr. Biden said last year that strengthening the act would be one of his first priorities after taking office; but on Tuesday, he sought to shift responsibility to lawmakers.“The court’s decision, as harmful as it is, does not limit the Congress’s ability to repair the damage done,” the president said. “As soon as Congress passes the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, I will sign it and want the whole world to see it.”His rallying cry only underscored the impossibility of the task: Neither bill currently has a path to his desk.Activists who had wondered whether Mr. Biden would stake out a public position on the filibuster got their answer on Tuesday: “I’m not filibustering now,” the president told reporters who shouted questions after his speech.“It was strange to hear,” Eli Zupnick, a spokesman for the anti-filibuster group Fix Our Senate, said after watching the speech. “He did a great job of laying out the problem, but then stopped short of talking about the actual solution that would be needed to passing legislation to address the problem.”As Mr. Biden spoke in Philadelphia, the group of Texas Democrats had traveled to Washington, where they were trying to delay state lawmakers from taking up restrictive voting measures.Representative Marc Veasey, Democrat of Texas, speaking at a press conference with Democratic members of the Texas Legislature on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesBoth measures would ban 24-hour voting and drive-through voting; prohibit election officials from proactively sending absentee ballot applications to voters who had not requested them; add new voter identification requirements for voting by mail; limit the types of assistance that can be provided to voters; and greatly expand the authority and autonomy of partisan poll watchers.In Austin, Republicans vented their anger at the fleeing group, and Gov. Greg Abbott vowed to call “special session after special session after special session” until an election bill passed. The handful of Democratic lawmakers who did not go to Washington were rounded up and ordered onto the Statehouse floor. Shawn Thierry, a Democratic state representative from Houston, posted to Twitter a video of a Statehouse sergeant-at-arms and a state trooper entering her office to order her to be locked in the House chamber.“This is not an issue about Democrats or Republicans,” Vice President Kamala Harris told the Texas lawmakers when she met with them on Tuesday. “This is about Americans and how Americans are experiencing this issue.”James Talarico, 32, the youngest member of the Texas Legislature, said the group of Democrats had gone to Washington, in part, to pressure Mr. Biden to do more.“We can’t listen to more speeches,” Mr. Talarico said. “I’m incredibly proud not only as a Democrat but also an American of what President Biden has accomplished in his first few months in office. But protecting our democracy should have been at the very top of the list, because without it none of these issues matter.”The restrictions in the Texas bills mirror key provisions of a restrictive law passed this year in Georgia, which went even further to assert Republican control over the State Election Board and empower the party to suspend county election officials. In June, the Justice Department sued Georgia over the law, the Biden administration’s first significant move to challenge voter restrictions at the state level.“The 21st-century Jim Crow assault is real,” Mr. Biden said as he listed the details of the Texas bills. “It’s unrelenting, and we are going to challenge it vigorously.”Zolan Kanno-Youngs More

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      In New Hampshire, Maggie Hassan May Face a High-Profile Fight

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      Senator Maggie Hassan, a former governor of her state, is working to burnish her centrist image without making political waves.MEREDITH, N.H. — At the Twin Barns Brewing Co., perched near the shoreline of Lake Winnipesaukee, Senator Maggie Hassan sampled some of the signature product on a recent afternoon, then chased it with a promise to fight for more reliable internet service, which the owners said they needed to maintain their customer base.“If you are a young professional and you’ve discovered over the 18 months of the pandemic that you don’t actually have to be in the office — you can work remotely — this is a perfect work-life balance,” said Dave Picarillo, co-owner of the brewery and restaurant, which has seen an uptick in business as people have decamped to New Hampshire’s Lakes Region during the pandemic. “But without broadband and cellular, that will never happen.”As she tried a tasty blonde ale, Ms. Hassan assured Mr. Picarillo and his partner, Bruce Walton, that she was on the case. She was part of a bipartisan group of senators who were working to speed a compromise infrastructure plan that included new broadband funding to President Biden’s desk — whether or not her party was able to push through a second, broader package of Democratic initiatives.“I think you’ve got to get things done when you have the opportunity,” said Ms. Hassan, a former two-term governor seeking a second Senate term.Ms. Hassan is the moderate Senate Democrat and potential swing vote who few people in Washington talk about. She does not make waves or grab headlines like Joe Manchin III or Kyrsten Sinema, her colleagues from West Virginia and Arizona who draw much of the attention as the centrists most likely to defect from their party. Her every utterance is not parsed for significance about what it means for legislative progress. Reporters don’t throng around her.And that’s no accident, she said: “I just like to keep my head down and get work done.”Yet while she tries to fly under the radar, what happens in Congress in the next few months as Democrats and Mr. Biden try to enact their ambitious agenda will probably do more to determine her future than either Mr. Manchin’s or Ms. Sinema’s. Unlike those two Democrats, Ms. Hassan will be on the ballot in a swing state next year, during a midterm cycle that is traditionally unkind to members of the president’s party.“I think she will, to a large extent next year, rise or fall with Joe Biden, his numbers and how New Hampshire voters will feel about the economy,” said Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire.Even more than those factors, her political future could turn on whether Chris Sununu, the popular Republican governor and a member of one of the state’s most prominent political families, decides to answer the call from his party to jump into the race. He would be a formidable opponent and immediately transform the New Hampshire race into a marquee contest, placing Ms. Hassan among the most threatened incumbents as Democrats try to retain their extremely fragile hold on the Senate.“If the race is with Sununu — and I don’t know if it is Sununu — it is going to be a tough one,” said Thomas D. Rath, a former state attorney general in New Hampshire and a longtime Republican force in the state.Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican and a member of a prominent New Hampshire political family, could challenge Ms. Hassan for her Senate seat in 2022.Pool photo by David LaneMr. Sununu, whose father was a former governor and White House chief of staff and whose brother was a U.S. senator, has not tipped his hand on whether he will run despite entreaties from Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, and others who believe he gives them by far the best chance of taking the seat as they battle for the majority. He has expressed some qualms about jumping into the Washington maelstrom, including losing the executive power that comes with being a governor to join a legislative body.“I’m a manager, I’m an executive,” Governor Sununu said last week on the New Hampshire Journal podcast. “There are very few of those in Washington,” he said, adding that he also has to determine, “is it the right path for my family? I have kids to put through college, and all that kind of stuff.”Still, the betting in both New Hampshire and Washington is that the governor, whose office declined an interview request, will make the race, finding it too hard to resist the opportunity.As for Mr. Hassan, she said the governor’s plans were not a factor in her own.“I don’t know, and it doesn’t really change my work,” she said last week when asked whether she thought Mr. Sununu would run. “I’m proud of what I’ve done and I will make my case to the people of New Hampshire.”While she may be low-key in Washington, Ms. Hassan has been a fixture in New Hampshire politics for almost two decades, serving in the State Senate as majority leader and twice winning races for governor before toppling Kelly Ayotte, the incumbent Republican senator, by just over 1,000 votes in 2016. Her allies say that Republicans have consistently underestimated Ms. Hassan, and will likely do so again.“She has got chops when it comes to winning tough races, and it has not just been one tough race,” said Kathy Sullivan, a former chairwoman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party. “She works very hard at it.”Republicans are already trying to paint Ms. Hassan as a loyal acolyte of Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and majority leader. They say her low profile — one called her “invisible” — is a sign of ineffectiveness.“We think with the way things are trending with the Democratic Party moving hard to the left, the outlook for 2022 and potentially a very strong challenger that this is a very winnable race for us,” said T.W. Arrighi, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.Ms. Hassan has been a fixture in New Hampshire politics for two decades.John Tully for The New York TimesAs she prepares for a likely onslaught, Ms. Hassan is emphasizing her bipartisan record, hoping it resonates with the famously independent voters of New Hampshire. As governor, Ms. Hassan found ways to work with Republican-controlled legislatures to approve state budgets and expand Medicaid coverage. She said she was now trying to apply that same approach in the Senate.She has teamed up with Republicans on a variety of issues, including tax assistance for small businesses, money for rural broadband and a crackdown on surprise medical billing included in a major funding bill last year. Now she is part of the group negotiating a bipartisan public works bill that Mr. Biden has hailed as a breakthrough.“We think it is really important for the country to see where we have common ground and see us really trying to work across party lines,” she said.But the bipartisan package is just one piece of the equation facing Congress. Democrats also want to force through a much larger measure that includes an expansive array of costly proposals, using a special budget maneuver known as reconciliation to shield it from a Republican filibuster. Many top Democrats believe the two bills should be linked and approved only in tandem to assure that both pass.But Ms. Hassan appears ready to push forward with the public works bill even as the reconciliation plan takes shape — a stance that could put her at odds with some colleagues. She says Congress needs to strike while it can.“I think it’s important that when you do have agreement on something as major as this level of infrastructure, which we need so desperately, that when there’s common ground, you come together,” she said at the brewery.Ms. Hassan is generally supportive of a second bill to advance other elements of Mr. Biden’s plan, some of which she said would be “critical to building a foundation for a modern 21st-century leading economy,” but first she wanted to see what was in it. She has balked in the past at using reconciliation to accomplish far-reaching progressive priorities. She was one of seven Democratic senators who voted against including a $15-an-hour minimum wage in the nearly $1.9 trillion pandemic aid bill passed under reconciliation with solely Democratic votes and enacted in March.Despite the legislative difficulties ahead, Ms. Hassan said she and her colleagues were in position to get much of what they sought, with a bipartisan imprint on some of it as a bonus.“You know, there are always some white-knuckle moments,” said Ms. Hassan about the coming legislative drama. “But I’m feeling optimistic.” More

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      Can the Senate Be Saved? Ben Nelson, the Manchin of Yesteryear, Has Doubts

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      A former Democratic centrist senator says too many lawmakers come to Washington to obstruct rather than be constructive.WASHINGTON — The senator adamantly insisted on bipartisanship. As his fellow Democrats enthusiastically embraced major priorities of the new president, he threatened to withhold his crucial vote unless changes were made and Republicans brought on board. He was statistically the Democrat most likely to break with his party.His name was Ben Nelson, and he was the Joe Manchin of his day in 2009, when the incoming administration of Barack Obama was being tested by Republicans and could not succeed without the vote of the Democratic centrist from Nebraska.“In a way, I think I was,” said Mr. Nelson, accepting the comparison with Mr. Manchin, the high-profile but hard-to-nail-down senator from West Virginia whose vote is pivotal to advancing the agenda of President Biden and congressional Democrats. “Though probably not with quite as much publicity about it.”Mr. Nelson, like Mr. Manchin a popular former governor, was elected to the Senate in 2000. He retired after two terms in 2012, but has kept an eye on Washington and has become discouraged by what he sees.His coming memoir is titled “Death of the Senate,” and although Mr. Nelson concedes that the institution still has a pulse, he sees it as gasping for breath even as Mr. Biden and some current centrist members struggle to produce a semblance of bipartisanship.One main problem, Mr. Nelson suggests, is that too many members of Congress come to Washington determined to stop things from happening, rather than finding ways to make things happen while extracting benefits for their constituents and, hopefully, the nation as a whole.“I wanted to get something done; therefore, by bringing some people together or through my vote, I was able to get something done more than to stop things,” said Mr. Nelson, who was also in the middle of a 2005 effort to prevent Republicans from eliminating the filibuster on judicial nominees. “Everybody wanted to get something done. Maybe they had different ideas about what should be done or how you should do it. But it wasn’t just obstructionists.”That is a big difference from the current climate, he said, where a significant number of Republicans are committed to yielding no ground to Democrats.“It is not a governable situation in D.C. right now for the president or for Congress, because you have the commitment of the Republican leader to block everything and let nothing get through,” he said.Mr. Nelson is referring, of course, to Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, whose determination to blockade Mr. Obama beginning in 2009 empowered Mr. Nelson in his dealings with the Obama administration.The dynamic is similar today, as Mr. McConnell’s zeal for stopping Mr. Biden’s agenda is giving leverage to Mr. Manchin and a few other Democrats. Mr. McConnell comes in for some tough criticism in Mr. Nelson’s book, which refers to the Republican leader as someone whose main interest is to “maintain a grip on political power and partisan advantage, come hell or high water.”Mr. Nelson, a Democrat, worked with Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, to bring down the cost of the stimulus bill in 2009.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesIn Mr. Nelson’s day, the situation was slightly different. Rather than the 50-50 split of today, Democrats controlled 57 votes in early 2009 — later to reach a filibuster-proof 60 for a brief period. And while Mr. Nelson was a constant target, the pool of centrists in both parties was larger then as congressional leaders and the White House sought to round up 60 votes to push through measures like an economic stimulus package and later the health care overhaul.Yet some aspects have remained remarkably similar. Then as now, Democrats like Mr. Nelson and Mr. Manchin, whose politics and constituents are more conservative than the rest of their party, come under withering pressure to drop their reservations and simply vote with the team. They also hold outsize sway, with the power to force their own leaders to jettison some priorities to accomplish major goals, and are by nature reluctant to reflexively side with their party even when the stakes are highest.As they look back on 2009, some progressive Democrats have been critical of their leaders’ willingness to bow to demands from Mr. Nelson and other moderates, saying it constrained the Obama administration. They worry that Mr. Biden is making a similar mistake in trying to bargain with Republicans and mollify Mr. Manchin.But Mr. Nelson said there was never really another option for getting things done.“It was either what we achieved as a compromise or perhaps nothing at all,” Mr. Nelson said. More expansive Obama-era proposals, he added, “didn’t have the votes. When people forget about vote-counting, you can be in La La Land all you want.”That is also true of Mr. Biden’s top priorities, nearly all of which lack the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster and cannot garner even a simple majority if Mr. Manchin refuses to sign on.Mr. Nelson balked at the initial stimulus proposal put forward by the Obama administration, writing in his book that the “House, under leadership from Speaker Nancy Pelosi, basically grabbed everything off the shelves that might be deemed economic stimulus and lumped it into an $819 billion package.”Working with Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and an occasional collaborator, Mr. Nelson organized a group — a gang, as they were known at the time — to press for the cost of the stimulus to be pared down and devote more to projects guaranteed to create jobs, eliminating some of the party’s priorities. It passed with the support of all Democrats and three Republicans, and has been criticized ever since for being inadequate.Mr. Nelson then played a major role in shaping and finally approving the Affordable Care Act, holding out over a provision that he said would put an undue burden on states by requiring them to expand Medicaid.Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada and the majority leader who was pulling out all the stops to pass the measure, suggested that the bill include $100 million to cover the costs to Nebraska. Republicans, even some Mr. Nelson had worked closely with, quickly derided it as the “Cornhusker kickback,” and the name stuck. Mr. Nelson said that the proposal was misconstrued and was simply a place-holder as the administration worked out a more permanent solution and options for states.“For my part, I had faced a critical choice,” Mr. Nelson writes, “to legislate or to vacate. I chose to legislate. Had I chosen the path taken by the Republicans, I could have just sailed along say no, no no.”“The political consequences in my largely red state would be considerably less for vacating than the benefits accrued for legislating,” he said. “But I couldn’t have lived with myself.”Mr. Nelson supported the bill, becoming the 60th vote for its approval. But the political damage was done as the news coverage of the special provision caused his popularity to drop back home. At the same time, the health care debate was fueling the Tea Party and made the bipartisanship that drove Mr. Nelson a dirty word.“There was a new element in Congress, a kind of political virus that would virtually kill bipartisanship,” he writes in his book. “There was a restive mood emerging in the conservative areas of the country, a movement of small-government, or antigovernment activists who had been, since the TARP bailout, demanding that their elected representatives stop working on a bipartisan basis with Democrats.”Despite the gridlock and combative partisanship that has swept the Senate, Mr. Nelson said he opposed eliminating the filibuster. In fact, he would like to see the 60-vote threshold restored for executive branch nominees.He acknowledged that the push for bipartisanship can be time-consuming and frustrating, but that he believed that the Senate was still capable of a change in culture.“It doesn’t happen at all if you just quit and say, ‘I’m not trying,’” he said.But if the people in the Senate cannot change, he said, it will be up to voters to change the Senate.“The change is going to come most likely from people back home saying enough is enough,” he said. “I hope the people back home begin to ask the question of anybody running for the House and the Senate: ‘Are you going to put the county and your state ahead of party? Are you going to be a patriot or are you just going to be partisan?’ Because they aren’t equivalent.” More

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      Mike Gravel, Unconventional Two-Term Alaska Senator, Dies at 91

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      He made headlines by fighting for an oil pipeline and reading the Pentagon Papers aloud. After 25 years of obscurity, he re-emerged with a quixotic presidential campaign.Mike Gravel, a two-term Democratic senator from Alaska who played a central role in 1970s legislation to build the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline but who was perhaps better known as an unabashed attention-getter, in one case reading the Pentagon Papers aloud at a hearing at a time when newspapers were barred from publishing them and later mounting long-shot presidential runs, died on Saturday at his home in Seaside, Calif. He was 91.The cause was myeloma, his daughter, Lynne Mosier, said.Defeated in his bid for a third Senate term in 1980, Mr. Gravel remained out of the national spotlight for 25 years before returning to politics to seek the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. He was a quirky fixture in several early debates in 2007, calling for a constitutional amendment to allow citizens to enact laws by referendums. But when the voting began in 2008, he never got 1 percent of the total in any primary.He nonetheless persisted, showing the same commitment to going it alone that he had displayed by nominating himself for vice president in 1972, staging one-man filibusters and reading the Pentagon Papers aloud — efforts that even senators who agreed with him regarded as grandstanding.But the pipeline was a lasting achievement, and one that forced him to develop allies. Senator Gravel (pronounced gruh-VELL), like most of his state’s leaders, favored construction of a pipeline to bring crude oil 800 miles from Alaska’s North Slope to the ice-free port of Valdez.But the project, formally proposed in 1969, was slowed or blocked in federal courts over environmental questions.Mr. Gravel seized the issue in 1973 by proposing legislation that would exempt the project from any further court intervention under the National Environmental Policy Act.Other pipeline supporters — including his Republican fellow Alaska senator, Ted Stevens — were wary because the environmental law was a proud accomplishment of Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington, the chairman of the Interior Committee, which dealt with many Alaska issues.Senator Jackson favored the pipeline and said he believed that a thorough review would show that it could be built without damage to the environment. But he insisted that breaching the environmental act would be an “unfortunate precedent.”The Nixon administration backed Mr. Gravel and his call for swift action. His measure won, 50 to 49, with Vice President Spiro T. Agnew casting the deciding vote. The House quickly agreed, and the pipeline, which opened in 1977, made oil the center of Alaska’s prosperity.Senator Gravel in 1971, the year he drew national notice by reading aloud from the Pentagon Papers at a Senate subcommittee hearing. He was elected to the Senate from Alaska in 1968 and served two terms.Meyer Liebowitz/The New York TimesMr. Gravel drew much more national notice on June 29, 1971. The New York Times and other newspapers were under court injunctions to stop publishing the Pentagon Papers, a secret, detailed government study of the war in Vietnam.He read aloud from the papers to a subcommittee hearing that he had quickly called after Republicans thwarted his effort to read them to the entire Senate. He read for about three hours, finally breaking down in tears and saying, “Arms are being severed, metal is crashing through human bodies — because of a public policy this government and all of its branches continue to support.” (In a major ruling on press freedom, the injunction against The Times was overturned by the Supreme Court the next day.)Mr. Gravel acknowledged many years later that his political ambition had led him to express support for the Vietnam War at the start of his political career, although he said he had personally opposed it.In his 1968 Democratic primary challenge to Senator Ernest Gruening, one of two senators to vote against the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized President Lyndon B. Johnson to use conventional military force in Southeast Asia, Mr. Gravel said the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh and not the United States was the aggressor. In 2007, while running for president, he told an NPR interviewer, “I said what I said back in 1968 because it was to advance my career.”He told Salon magazine the same year that Alaskans did not share Mr. Gruening’s opposition to the war at the time, and that “when I ran, being a realistic politician, all I had to do was stand up and not deal with the subject, and people would assume that I was to the right of Ernest Gruening, when in point of fact I was to the left of him.”Mr. Gravel won that primary, stressing his youth (he was 38 to Mr. Gruening’s 81) and campaigning in the smallest of villages, where he showed a half-hour movie about his campaign. He went on to defeat his Republican rival, Elmer E. Rasmuson, a banker and former mayor of Anchorage, in the general election.Senator Gravel in Miami Beach in July 1972, shortly before the Democratic National Convention there. He nominated himself for vice president.UPIHe won again in 1974, aided by the pipeline issue. But he lost the 1980 Democratic primary to Senator Gruening’s grandson, Clark Gruening. Mr. Gravel accused Mr. Gruening, who had announced that he would not take special interest money, of being “dishonest” because, he said, Jews who had made individual contributions amounted to a special interest group “that seeks to influence the foreign policy of the U.S.”Mr. Gravel had enjoyed little support from his party, depending instead on political action committees. His main issue was his all-out opposition to legislation designating more than 104 million acres in Alaska for new national parks, wildlife refuges and conservation areas.But when the Senate broke his filibuster against the bill and passed it just before the primary, it was a fatal blow to his campaign. He lost to Clark Gruening, who went on to lose the general election to Frank Murkowski.Senator Gravel had first sought national office by nominating himself for vice president at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. Thirty-four years later, after returning to the real estate business and disappearing from the public eye, he announced his candidacy for the presidency.In the early primary debates for the 2008 election, he found much more public interest in the Iraq war than in his ideas about allowing citizens to enact laws, so he stressed his opposition to it, calling the Democratic senators who were seeking the nomination “gutless wonders” for not bringing the war to a halt.He was not invited to the later debates because of his low poll standings and fund-raising totals. He soldiered on, largely unnoticed during the contest between Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. In New Hampshire, where he did the most campaigning, he got just 404 votes, or one-seventh of 1 percent, in the state’s primary.In March, he formally quit the Democratic contest and unsuccessfully sought the nomination of the Libertarian Party. His best showing came a few weeks later, when he got four-fifths of 1 percent in the North Carolina Democratic Primary.Maurice Robert Gravel was born in Springfield, Mass., on May 13, 1930, to Alphonse and Maria (Bourassa) Gravel. His father was a contractor. Both his parents were French Canadian immigrants from Quebec, and the future senator did not speak English until he was 7.Mr. Gravel attended American International College in Springfield, served in the Army in the Counterintelligence Corps and then drove a cab in New York City while studying economics at Columbia University.He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1956 and set off for Alaska, which was not yet a state. He worked in real estate and as a brakeman on the snow-clearing trains of the Alaska Railroad before starting his political career.Alaska attained statehood in 1958, and Mr. Gravel was elected to the State House of Representative in 1962. He served as speaker in 1965 and 1966 before leaving for an unsuccessful primary challenge to a four-term Democratic congressman, Ralph Rivers. Mr. Rivers then lost to the Republican candidate, Howard Pollock.Two years later, Mr. Gravel was elected to the Senate.After his defeat in 1980, Mr. Gravel returned to the real estate business but did not do well. He went bankrupt, as did his company.Mr. Gravel at the first Democratic presidential debate of the 2008 campaign, at Carolina State University in Orangeburg, S.C., in April 2007. He was a quirky fixture in several early debates, but when the voting began he never got 1 percent of the total in any primary.Doug Mills/The New York TimesHe is survived by his wife, Whitney (Stewart) Gravel; two children from his first marriage to Rita Martin, which ended in divorce, Martin Anthony Gravel and Lynne Denise Mosier; two sisters, Marie Lombardi and Sister Marguerite Gravel; four grandchildren and a great-grandson.In 2019, Mr. Gravel had one last political hurrah: He filed to run for president one more time, although he said he was running not to win but to qualify for the debates and “bring a critique of American imperialism to the Democratic debate stage.” He discouraged people from voting for him. His campaign was run by two teenagers, primarily on Twitter; Mr. Gravel himself had little involvement.After not qualifying for the first two debates, Mr. Gravel ended his campaign in August 2019 and announced that he would use some of his remaining campaign funds to establish a progressive think tank, the Gravel Institute.Into his later years Mr. Gravel held fast to his belief in direct democracy. He detailed his ideas for a fourth branch of the federal government, calling it the Legislature of the People, which would allow voters to pass new laws directly, circumventing in particular the Senate, which he saw as hopelessly corrupt.“What you need to have, and what I seem to have, is unreserved faith in the people,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 2019. “There’s nothing else. And you can say: ‘Well, boy. That’s a stretch!’ You know what? The alternative is minority rule by the elites of society.”Adam Clymer, a reporter and editor at The Times from 1977 to 2003, died in 2018. William McDonald and Jack Kadden contributed reporting. More

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      A Bill Destined to Fail May Now Spawn More Plausible Options

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      The For the People Act had little chance of testing the limits of what if anything is still possible in Washington. Oddly, it was so far from passage that it may provide some hope, because so many avenues remain to be pursued.The demise of the For the People Act — the far-reaching voting rights bill that Republicans blocked in the Senate on Tuesday — will come as a crushing blow to progressives and reformers, who have portrayed the law as an essential tool for saving democracy.But it was a flawed bill that had little chance of testing the limits of what if anything is still possible in Washington. Voting rights activists and Democratic lawmakers may even find that the collapse of this law opens up more plausible, if still highly unlikely, paths to reform.The law, known as H.R. 1 or S. 1, was full of hot-button measures — from public financing of elections to national mail voting — that were only tangentially related to safeguarding democracy, and all but ensured its failure in the Senate. Its supporters insisted the law should set the floor for voting rights; in truth, it set the floor at the ceiling, by guaranteeing a level of voting access that would be difficult to surpass.At the same time, reformers did not add provisions to tackle the most insidious and serious threat to democracy: election subversion, where partisan election officials might use their powers to overturn electoral outcomes.Instead, it focused on the serious but less urgent issues that animated reformers at the time the bill was first proposed in 2019: allegations of corruption in the Trump administration, the rise of so-called dark money in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, or the spate of voter identification laws passed in the aftermath of President Barack Obama’s election victories.Even a cursory look at the effort by former President Donald J. Trump to subvert the 2020 election revealed a number of vulnerabilities in the electoral system, from the risk that a partisan election administrator might simply refuse to certify an unfavorable election result to the possibility that a vice president might choose not to count a certified electoral slate. None of those vulnerabilities were addressed.Those concerns have only escalated over the last several months as Republicans have advanced bills that not only imposed new limits on voting, but also afforded the G.O.P. greater control over election administration. The new powers include the ability to strip secretaries of state of some of their authority and remove members of local election boards. The New York Times reported over the weekend how some Democrats on local boards in Georgia, including people of color, were losing their positions.Senate Republicans used the filibuster on Tuesday to block debate on an ambitious Democratic bill aimed at countering a wave of ballot restrictions in G.O.P.-controlled states.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesIt’s true that the 2020 election and Mr. Trump’s unprecedented attempt to undermine it revealed the fragility of American democracy in different and more fundamental ways than even the most perspicacious legislator could have anticipated. Originally, the bill was seen as a “political statement,” a progressive “wish list” or a “messaging bill,” not as the basis for a realistic legislative effort.It was not designed to appeal to the moderate Senate Democrats, who progressives nonetheless hoped would eliminate the filibuster even as they insisted on different proposals and a bipartisan approach.Yet oddly, the bill was so far from passage that reformers still have cause for some semblance of hope. Nearly every stone was left unturned.As a result, many other avenues for reform remain to be pursued. None seem likely to be enacted in today’s political climate. All are more plausible than the bill that died in the Senate on Tuesday.One of those avenues emerged in the final days of the push for H.R. 1: a grand bargain, like the one recently suggested by Joe Manchin III, the moderate Democratic senator from West Virginia who provoked outrage among progressives when he said he would oppose the bill in its current form.Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, opposed the voting bill in its current form but proposed several compromises that gained favor with advocates. Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesThe Manchin compromise resembles H.R. 1 in crucial ways. It does not address election subversion any more than H.R. 1 does. And it still seeks sweeping changes to voting, ethics, campaign finance and redistricting law. But it offers Republicans a national voter identification requirement, while relenting on many of the provisions that provoke the most intense Republican opposition.Mr. Manchin’s proposal nonetheless provoked intense Republican opposition. Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri derided it as a “Stacey Abrams” bill. Mitch McConnell, the minority leader from Kentucky, appeared to suggest that no federal election law would earn his support.More generally, it is hard to imagine how Republicans could be enticed to accept stringent limits on gerrymandering, given the lopsided partisan consequences of such a ban.But the strategy behind the Manchin proposal could nonetheless serve as a basis for serious legislative efforts: Democrats can offer Republicans provisions they actually want on voting, like new photo identification requirements, and see what that buys them.The willingness of Ms. Abrams, who leads the Georgia-based voting rights group Fair Fight, to support the Manchin compromise, despite its embrace of voter ID measures — an archetypal voter suppression provision — suggests that there may be room to explore options that might attract support from Republicans and haven’t previously been 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a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Another avenue is a version of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would again subject Southern states to obtain federal clearance before making changes to their voting system — a requirement that a 2013 Supreme Court decision gutted.Restoring the preclearance condition is of considerable symbolic significance, but it offers far less to reformers than the Manchin compromise. It does nothing to address the laws that Republicans have enacted this year. It would do little to protect against election subversion. It does not check Republican efforts outside the South. And it relies on the federal court system, which has a more limited view of the Voting Rights Act than reformers would like.But unlike H.R. 1, restoring federal preclearance does have the support of Mr. Manchin and Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska. Mr. Manchin also seemed willing to embrace a variety of largely unspecified changes that might make preclearance somewhat more amenable to the Republicans, including an objective test to determine whether jurisdictions should be subjected to or relieved from preclearance and limits on the power of the attorney general. It remains doubtful that any changes would attract significant Republican support, but it also remains untested.A final avenue is an even narrower bill, comprising only provisions that attract bipartisan support. It remains to be seen whether even a single idea falls into this category. But many of the hypothesized proposals for addressing election subversion might have some chance to find Republican support, like reforms to the rules for counting electoral votes, and funding for election administration.Other potential areas of agreement are a requirement for paper ballots; ballot chain-of-custody requirements; standards for certification of federal elections and establishing voter eligibility; and clarifying whether and when judges or local officials can defy a state legislature.None of these proposals necessarily advantage either political party. All would have a chance to avoid the central, politicized debate over voter suppression and voting rights.Realistically, even the most innocuous proposals would have a challenging path to passage. The window for bipartisan cooperation on these issues may have closed several months ago, as memories of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters were supplanted by politically charged fights over voting rights and voter suppression. Republicans have few incentives to support a bill, even if watered down considerably.Yet all of these new avenues for reformers have something simple in common: They involve an earnest attempt to win 60 votes in the Senate, something that H.R. 1 did not. Many progressives scoff at the idea, but if moderate Democrats can be taken at their word, then reformers never had a choice but to at least try to find Republican support.Voting rights activists on Tuesday called for a new push to ensure voting rights, and Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader from New York, pledged to keep fighting, calling the Senate vote “the starting gun, not the finish line.”Perhaps reformers will surprise themselves and pull off a rare legislative win. More likely, their effort will fail and they can hope that their failure will demonstrate the impossibility of bipartisanship to Senate moderates, perhaps reopening the conversation about eliminating the filibuster.Wherever the effort might end, a more realistic legislative push begins with an earnest effort to write a bill that is more responsive to the current threats to the system and is designed to win enough votes to pass. More